Newsletter May 2026 - Goblin Mode

Hey everyone,

For those with kids or in education, happy end of the school year! Another one down. For me, it also means the end of another choir season. Our spring concert blew everyone away as my skill and confidence continue to improve. My favorite piece was Agnus Dei, which you'll recognize from Platoon and many other movies where something bad happens in slow motion. Here's another choir's version. I'll share ours when the video gets posted.

In other news, I'm finishing up my 3D modeling course. The goblin head at the top is one of the final projects in the course. I was following along with the instructions, but I got my own touches in there. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though trying to go for that very high resolution and detailed look stressed me out. It did force me to learn and practice skills that will help with a future animation project.

With summer here, I'm finalizing what project I want to do. On the business side, I need to republish the updated version of A Clockwork Murder, and also break it up into individual chapters to post here and on other sites as a serial. I'm also reviving an old effort to turn Choosing Fate into a script. When I first started that effort, my friend who made short films thought it would make a great script. He's since moved, so I considered doing it as a comic. Now that I've built more modeling and animation skills, I'm going that route.

Scripts have long intrigued me. When creating the Nerni books, I realized the pictures were as important as the words and the total story was more than the sum of the parts. Or could be. Not sure I achieved that greatness. So I spent time reading scripts and have worked on a few that never went anywhere. I did write a script for a Star Trek story featuring an original ship and crew, which I was proud of. You can read it. See the link just above for the post about it. It became the basis for my first animation, though there's no speaking parts and the story is very different. The music was the main focus for that effort, and I was limited to 1 minute. I am proud of it and have longed for another project to hit me. More about the video in this post.

I like big projects and I cannot lie. Currently I'm editing the short into a script, and then I'll hire voice actors to record the dialog. Fortunately my kids are big into theater, so I have access to labor that will work for boba tea and pizza. 😼

On the reading front, I finished Maeve Fly by CJ Leede. Great characters and story. Well written, but I found it disturbing and intense. I enjoyed it, but needed a break, so I'm now reading The Murderbot Diaries: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells. Next on the Horror Pile is I Died Too, But They Haven't Buried Me Yet by Ross Jeffrey. And as I mentioned last time, maybe a summer reread of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun epic. That should keep me out of trouble.

Happy start of the summer!
Todd